Tag Archives: love

He built himself a bot friend from tidbits and leftovers of the rich and famous. Its input was their interviews and tweets and stolen text messages that they sent to each other. It could learn, but not understand. It could remember, but not feel. It was artificial, yet not intelligent. It was, in his mind, a woman.

She had no face or body or avatar or voice. She communicated by text alone. The rest, as is usual in these cases, was in his mind.

There was a woman who mutilated history. She did it by building a time machine in order to punish an unfaithful lover. It isn’t clear whether said companion was a man or a woman, for she or he, having never been born, is not available for questioning. That person, in fact, cannot be found anywhere and anywhen in history, or creation, or the universe, whichever way you prefer to call that phenomena.

Being thus erased, one might correctly assume, can hardly be considered a punishment at all, since there’s no punishable object. Notice how the words “any longer” were cunningly avoided here, as said object has never existed in the first place.

The woman who, also cunningly, built the time machine and removed her unfaithful lover from insert-preferred-phenomena-here, should have realised all this before executing her, well, cunning, plan, and indeed would have done so, were she not so taken with the blinding rage which caused her to build the time machine in the first place. She would have realised it soon enough afterwards – a somewhat inaccurate word, in this case – were it not for her action promptly – also inaccurate – erasing herself from the preferred-phenomena, and then – also inaccurate – the phenomena itself, which was replaced – also etc. – with something completely different in which we – etc. – live – etc. – right now – etc. – and know nothing whatsoever of women or men or time or rage or love.